Over the last few years, a growing chorus of insider critics have been exposing serious flaws in the ways that scientific research is funded and published, leading some to go so far as to say,”Science is broken.”

The dysfunctions they describe include:

– Deliberate, unconscious, and systemic fraud
– Irreproducibility of results and lack of incentive to attempt replication
– Misuse of statistics, such as “P-hacking” – the mining of research data to extract a post-hoc “hypothesis” for publication
– Severe flaws in the system of peer review (see here and here), for example, its propensity to enforce existing paradigms, to be hostile to anything that challenges the views of the reviewers whose careers are invested in those views.
– Difficulty in obtaining funding for creative and unorthodox research hypotheses
– Publication bias that also favors positive results over negative results, and suppresses research that won’t benefit a researcher’s career

ROBERT STEELE: I have felt for some time that education, intelligence, and research need to be under a single Secretary-General, with an Open Source Agency as the hub for assuring both public access to all information in all languages all the time, and public access for open source everything engineering relevant to creating the activist open source tool-kit and means for multinational multiagency, multidisciplinary multidomaint information sharing and sense-making (M4IS2).